Saudi Arabia on Trial

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Saudi Arabia

 

A bill passed by the US Congress promises this. It was vetoed by President Obama – who cited concerns that it would allow the world to sue America for war crimes – but many Democrats and most Republicans waived such valid concerns aside. I should admit that I am all for suing Saudi Arabia, particularly the Wahhabite clergy, whose vast wealth finances much terrorism, and all of the Third World’s free Islamist schools, which teach the obnoxious Wahhabibite heresy, along with its hateful attitudes towards Shia Muslims, Sufis, and the numerous other orthodox Muslim sects. The proposed law-suit concerns 9/11, of course – why would Americans concern themselves with matters that don’t concern them? But, attempting to skirt the many conspiracy theories, there are indeed many vexing questions about that fateful day. For example, why was the only aircraft permitted to fly a Saudi jetliner taking royals back home? For that matter, who gave the order for US fighters to stand down, when standard procedure during a hijacking is for airforce jets to scramble? On a more mundane level: what happened to the security-camera footage that would have captured the airplane which hit the Pentagon? If it was an airplane. At least one on-site observer claims it was a US-army missile. Just show the footage, and then – no problem. The conspiracy-minded claim that 9/11 was a plot, a disaster designed to change the course of history and, particularly, US law-enforcement. Well, there is no doubt that US law-enforcement dramatically changed course after September 11^th, 2001, erasing many of the constitutional provisions for basic citizens’ rights. Although the lack of citizen-protest may suggest that those who don’t value rights ought not to have them. The disaster may have been an opening for opportunists – as some say the Reichstag fire was for Hitler’s Nazis, encouraging more severe racial laws – or it may have been diabolically planned. This latter is hard to believe, not for want of diabolism in the parties necessarily involved, but for the rampant stupidity such parties habitually display. Unless limited to one or two people, a conspiracy is impossible to keep secret. Even things about 9/11 that have a logical explanation are still cloaked in a ridiculous miasma of so-called security. For instance, any viewer of video showing the towers coming down can see, if the tape is slowed down, explosions blowing out each lower corner. As levels blow out, the upper structures come down. It’s obvious and undeniable. I asked a Manhattan architect about it. The answer was straightforward enough. ‘Any towers built from the late fifties on,’ he said, ‘have plastic explosives built into the corners of each floor. It’s essential. You can’t have these structures falling down in the event of a catastrophe. One would fall onto another, and in no time you’d have a domino-effect where half the city was brought down. The explosives are perfectly safe – they need a detonator to ignite – but their existence is kept secret because people are jumpy. Who wants to live or work in a building wired to explode? But, as you saw, it came in useful.’ That explained, for me, an anomaly preposterously easy to spot. One wonders why network media haven’t pointed it out. Slow the tape, and it’s plain to see – unless you’ve been told not to see it.

But taking the Saudis to court involves other issues. True, 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals. True too that various Saudi consulates and embassies in the US assisted in some way the hijackers needs for accommodations, materiel, and, yes, flying lessons. But how to find the personnel operating in these diplomatic enclaves at that time? The answer is they won’t be found. A thousand reasons will make this reasonable – apart from the problem of Arabic names written in Arabic.

But, for all the specific evidences of malfeasance, Saudi Arabia is also one vast galloping example of global despicability. For far too long – or for far too much oil – the Kingdom has got a free pass from the West. This would be a West deploring human rights violations and even ‘barbarism’ elsewhere. Well, elsewhere ought to include the spurious Gulf kleptocracy. Where women have no rights whatsoever. Where music is banned. Where political gatherings are banned. Where possession of alcohol is cause for a death, or, if not, a life sentence. Where homosexuals are executed – beheaded by sword. Where you can be sentenced – like a friend of mine – for five years in jail if found guilty of possessing half a joint. And five years there is five years, not a third of that. You’re confined, ridiculed, abused, and then released. You never view the Kingdom in a kindly way again. All the dismal place warrants, to any outsider, is a massive cleaning up.

Bearing in mind the perennial free pass, it will be interesting to observe how current Saudi hierarchs wheedle their way out this latest, and wholly justified, accusatory predicament,

 

Paul William Roberts

 

The Great Debate?

Tags

america, Donald Trump, election, Hilary Clinton, lies, politics, USA

Really. The Hilary versus the Donald. Has there ever been a more dispiriting spectacle than these two individuals presenting themselves before 100 million viewers as viable candidates for what is believed to be the world’s most important and powerful job? Well, yes – every previous election campaign for the last fifty years springs to mind. But this one still caps them in its stunning efflorescence of blabbering mediocrity. The Hilary started off with a remarkable appearance of competence that revealed her as another run-of-the-mill Democrat, ablaze with high ideals appealing to a vaunted ‘middle class’, yet no more certain of how these lofty goals were to be achieved than her opponent was of how his plans to aid the wealthy made it clear how the neo-trickle-down effect would work. For his part, the Donald began by assuring us he wanted ‘Secretary Clinton’ – as she now was – to be comfortable and happy. After all, she was just a woman. He was Trump the Proud – albeit with a nasal drip that sounded as if he’s just snorted a hefty line of cocaine. Unfortunately, and doubtless contrary to the advice of his advisers, he allowed the Hilary to press his well-known and easy buttons. And, equally unfortunately, she decided that pressing them was her objective in this so-called debate. Unsurprisingly, a free-for-all ensued, with both candidates displaying little more than how unsuited they each were for the world’s most important job. The Hilary avoided answering issues like why she had deleted 33,000 e-mails from her improper server – and largely because the Donald’s bullish responses to her taunts blinded him to questions worth pursuing. Pundits understandably excoriated him for bragging that his avoidance of income tax was ‘smart’, without taking into account the fact that everyone similarly burdened with taxes, no matter how slight, would agree that it was smart. The host, or beleaguered question-master, tied insinuating some relevant queries – ‘Why don’t you release your tax returns?’ – but the combatants had grown too belligerent to pay attention. The Donald tried to point out that the Secretary – no doubt a demeaning title in his world – had once raised the issue of where Obama had been born during her fight for the White House, yet he raised it in terms assuming viewers and listeners knew the names of principals involved. We did not, largely, but by then no one cared. It seemed clear that here were two thoroughly distasteful people, neither of whom ought to attain any prominent public position, less still the one they aspired to.

The question I most wanted answered, listening to the Donald’s oft-repeated slogan, was one of when exactly it was that America could have been considered ‘great’. Was it during the Korean War?  The coup d’etat in Iran overthrowing nascent democracy there? The Vietnam War? The invasions of Grenada, Panama et al? CIA coups in Chile, Nicaragua and elsewhere in the region? Afghanistan? Iraq? Libya? Or now the debacle in Syria? When was this greatness, and of what did it consist? The Donald’s answers to this question would have been as enlightening as the Hilary’s answers to why her new bold plans had not been at least partially implemented over the past thirty-odd years of her political career. Yet it was all the ringmaster could do to keep the slug-fest on its scheduled course to where the final issues weren’t dealt with either.

Ah, America, we aliens think. What became of your great idea? What are we to make of a nation that can only produce these two sad wretches as its potential leaders? Perhaps we should be frightened? As it is, though, we are merely bored by watching your decline and fall – as we were by watching that of every empire once so gripped by hubris and so willfully ignorant of which way the wind always blows.

The only undeniably true thing said last night was, uncharacteristically, by the Trump: no more dire and pressing an issue exists for this world than the existence and proliferation of atmomic eeapons. Unlike global warming, this is two buttons pressed and – zap! That’s all, folks. Like a thief in the nuclear night, all human aspirations vanish forever. What more pressing an issue could we want anyone posing as a world leader to face and solve?

 

Paul William Roberts

P.S. And talking about political liars, what of British foreign secretary Boris Johnston’s meeting with the Turkish leader, whom he recently called “a terrific wankerer very fond of goats…”?

Diamond’s Are A Churl’s Best Friend

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diamonds

 

How wonderful to hear the fanfare surrounding De Beer’s global diamond cartel, as its boots stride further over Canada! Nice to know the Indigenous will be getting some work out of the new scheme too. But not a word about the actual nature of diamonds, eh? I recommend Jay Epstein’s book, Diamonds, exhaustively concise, well-researched, disturbingly informative, and freely available for the past thirty years. In a nutshell: the only diamonds one can consider precious stones are those found in river beds, the ‘yellow’ diamonds. Elizabeth Taylor owned one. The Star of Bengal is one. The rest are semi-precious stones, and a good many of those are in fact worthless industrially-manufactured items (you greatly compress coal, in essence). These faux-gems always feature the so-called ‘diamond cut’, a multi-facetted look without which they wouldn’t glimmer like…well, like diamonds. You’d never cut a truly precious stone that way. The fewer facets the better a real stone is – that’s why they’re precious and rare. Emeralds have the five-facetted ‘emerald cut’. Rubies often are ‘cabochon’. Why then are diamonds the stock-in-trade of most chain-jewellers? Think about it. Garbage sold as gold? But how would you convince punters that garbage is gold? You would have to control the world’s diamond-market. De Beer’s does this. From the South African mines – where diamonds are found adjacent to the veins of coal from whence they were originally formed by further compression – to the artificial stones manufactured in Russia, one corporation controls the price and the supply. The gangster and occasional premier of Russia, Vladimir Putin, has a large stake in this business – so you know it’s blue-chip all the way. Australia once tried to opt out of the massive cartel, but found itself blacklisted, boycotted, and begging to get back in. De Beer’s is nothing if not cunning in its marketing of trash. You all know the slogan: A Diamond Is Forever? Remember? Why is it forever? Well, it’s most commonly found in engagement rings – and who pawns one of those, no matter how horrendous a bastard he was? The thing is, if you try to sell the ring you bought for five grand, you’ll be offered bubkas for it, nothing. Epstein recounts the story of a woman who bought a diamond necklace for thirty K in Tiffany’s, NYC – that’s, say, 150-odd K today. On her way home, she saw elsewhere a piece of jewelry she liked more. So she went back to Tiffany’s to return the piece. ‘Oh, we don’t purchase second-hand items,’ said the man, suggesting a nearby place that might. The woman went there, and to a few other establishments as well. The best offer she got for the 30 K necklace purchased hours earlier was five thousand dollars. That’s a 600 percent mark-up, for a start. It also basically covers just the cost of gold, settings, and craftsmanship.

A diamond is forever. It wasn’t in Japan, though, where the concept of an engagement was unknown. As Japan clambered out of its post-war slump and nuking by Uncle Sam, growing electronic and very prosperous, De Beer’s took an interest. Before long, these intrepid diamond-hawkers had introduced the idea of engagements into a society which, while intrinsically hyper-conservative, was also mysteriously addicted to Americana. An extreme version of Stokholm Syndrome, perhaps? And so a diamond is forever in the land of the rising sun now. And forever.

I think it’s safe to say that the diamond trade is essentially a fraud perpetrated upon the unwise and unwary. Naturally it won’t get much outraged attention – who cares about suckers buying rings? Many crimes go unobserved, however. And many of these are also seemingly legitimate enterprises. Insurance and banking don’t bear much scrutiny – but millions use them every day, so governments, knowing full well the potential for blowback, stay on the sidelines. Here the thieves are welcomed in with trumpets and open arms. A few jobs to the dispossessed, and we’re in like Flynn. Yet, knowing what we now know – or would after reading Epstein’s book – do we actually want to become partners-in-crime with such obviously shameless and venal hoods? Or perhaps the real question is what happened to the media we used to rely on for exposing this kind of rampant malfeasance? Since the culprits can’t answer, I will help: we’re so scared of legal action, they’d say in response, that we’d rather betray our calling and purpose than have an expensive law-suit on the boss’s hands. And so a once-noble profession sails ignobly into the sunset called ‘entertainment’. If only it were entertaining, though…

 

Paul William Roberts

Nate Parker’s Problem

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film

 

In fact it’s our problem. Nate Parker is the young black actor and director whose first film, Birth of a Nation (no, not that one, the new one), received standing ovations at the Sundance Festival. Then came the puzzling news that Parker was charged with rape some ten years ago, a charge for which he was acquitted. Nota bene: a charge for which he was acquitted. The next thing we hear, curtesy of a media hallucinating the smell of blood, is a question. Should we now go to see his apparently masterful film? Oddly enough, most answers aired, on the radio at least (the blind have little use for TV), were negative. This ancient acquittal for rape evidently changes the way you view a film. One wonders how. Next the conversation bloats into the knotty problem of whether or not it is possible to separate the artist from the art – a problem settled centuries ago by more astute men and women. Considering the less than flawless characters of artists going back to the Deluge – and spiritual leaders for that matter, as well as many luminaries – we would halve the accepted classics in any field, if work was judged by moral probity. This drooling non-debate was then dragged into the Toronto International Film Festival, where media rose to emphasise its limitless capacity for changing the conversation to suit its own despicably venal purposes. Mr. Parker was there to talk about his film – it was a film festival after all. Journalists, however, were now there to interview him about the decade-old rape charge. One imagined that even the most sadistic hack would see fit to mention that Parker had been acquitted – in the interests of accuracy and honesty, if for no other reason. But none did (again, on radio, the news and current affairs shows). To complete this disgraceful display of moral turpitude, some journalists had the astounding gall to complain that PR people cut their interviews short when they persisted with asking the same questions about something that a court decided never happened ten years ago. Of course, then this became the story – oh, how wronged we poisonous scriveners and pompous yackers are! What’s he hiding? Why won’t he answer the questions? The questions, remember, regarding what did not happen.

Now, it is no mean feat for a young Afro-American to realise any dream, let alone act in, co-write and direct a major film. Parker was rightly hailed as a rising star, someone to watch — until the media decided otherwise. We much prefer to see you go down in flames, idol – it makes for a better story, our story, not yours. Our slanders and yentas’ gossip, really. The nattering classes have not done with it yet. It is added to a stack of similar travesties that raise one big question. It would seem that you are not innocent until proven guilty – a foundation or legal system — if charged with a sexual assault, or even alleged to have been involved in one – rumoured too. Leaving the nature of rape cases aside – these are really legal issues and questions of impartial justice – there are three notable cases in which the courts of media have tried, judged and convicted men either later proven innocent in court or not even charged with a crime. Careers are being ruined by the smear machine, and allegedly serious people continue with the wretchedly stupid issue of separating art from artist. Jian Qomeshi: acquitted, career down in flames. Woody Allen: not charged with anything, no victim-complaint, long and laudable career poisoned by rumours and lies. And, most poignant of all, Nate Parker: acquitted, dawn of a promising career turned to sunset by media malfeasance, spite, envy, and the pious self-righteousness of people who have achieved nothing but bile and too much time on their busy hands. As said, the rape-on-trial issue is a separate debate. This is about the persecution of innocent people. It is also about the difference between a person and their work. If you choose not to see or read a film or book because you have been told to disapprove of the artist’s character – after all, you don’t actually know anything independently – then you will presumably refuse to accept one of the principles of modern physics because its discoverer had a predilection for under-age hirls (no, I won’t say whom; it will only fan old embers into flickering life). There is no difference. Brilliant work is brilliant work; morally reprehensible behaviour is what it is. Dostoyevsky is one of my favourite writers; he also raped an eleven-year-old girl – an act I consider high on the charts of evil. But it does not affect the genius and mastery of his work. Such a list will be interminable. We must accept that the people having these ludicrous yacks are not the people who appreciate, understand or even like art in the first place. Which begs the question of why they are given a media pulpit to bore and bully us with. Turn it all off and read a good book.

 

Paul William Roberts